Stories from Goa, presented by Edila Gaitonde — who encountered this region as a young Catholic Portuguese girl experiencing life in an Orthodox Goan Hindu household. Stories of inter-caste love, a dominant feature in Goan storytelling, set against the backdrop of the Liberation of Goa.
This collection of stories presented by Edila Gaitonde is told from a point of view which shouldn’t be ignored; that of a young Catholic Portuguese girl who experiences life in a Goan Hindu household. An innate sense of survival makes her assimilate into this environment as quickly as possible and get an insider’s view on its nuances, its contradictions and its struggles with modernity. There are stories of inter-faith love, one set against the backdrop of what Edila knows best, the Liberation of Goa. There are other stories of inter-racial love, of parents trying to cope in a world changing faster than them; stories of betrayal and disappointment, of fate and battling fatalism. There is a sensitive understanding of the human condition; its fragility and its heroic resilience.
Edila weaves in symbols like the sacred tulsi plant and the rãppan (the lengthy fishing net that dominated Goan beaches of yesteryears) to deeper the thrust of her fiction, for it is in fiction that we create a profound truth reflective of our society. These stories represent the eternal human dance between the past and the present, the old and the modern, and the divided and assimilated. It is a dance which takes us forward even as it keeps us tethered to all that is important.
